CTS Development

Initializing your Repo client

Follow the instructions
to get and build the Android source code but specify a particular CTS branch
name, for example-b android-5.0_r2, when issuing the repo
init command. This assures your CTS changes will be included in the
next CTS release and beyond.

Building and running CTS

Execute the following commands to build CTS and start the interactive
CTS console:

Note: You may supply one of these other values
for TARGET_PRODUCT to build for different architectures:
aosp_x86_64 or aosp_mips

Writing CTS tests

CTS tests use JUnit and the Android testing APIs. Review the
Testing and Instrumentation
tutorial while perusing the existing tests under the
cts/tests directory. You will see that CTS tests mostly follow the same
conventions used in other Android tests.

Since CTS runs across many production devices, the tests must follow
these rules:

Must take into account varying screen sizes, orientations, and keyboard layouts.

Only use public API methods. In other words, avoid all classes, methods, and fields that are annotated with the "hide" annotation.

Avoid relying upon particular view layouts or depend on the dimensions of assets that may not be on some device.

Don't rely upon root privileges.

Test naming and location

Most CTS test cases target a specific class in the Android API. These tests
have Java package names with a cts suffix and class names with the
Test suffix. Each test case consists of multiple tests, where each
test usually exercises a particular method of the class being tested.
These tests are arranged in a directory structure where tests are grouped into
different categories such as "widgets" and "views."

For example, the CTS test for the Java package
android.widget.TextView is
android.widget.cts.TextViewTest with its Java package name as
android.widget.cts and its class name as
TextViewTest.

Java package nameThe Java package name for the CTS tests
is the package name of the class that the test is testing, followed by ".cts".
For our example, the package name would be android.widget.cts.

Class nameThe class name for CTS tests is name of the class that the test is testing with "Test" appended. (For
example, if a test is targeting TextView, the class name should be
TextViewTest.)

Module name (CTS v2 only)CTS v2 organizes tests by module.
The module name is usually the second string of the Java package name (in our
example, widget), although it does not have to be.

The directory structure and sample code depend on whether you are using CTS v1
or CTS v2.

CTS v1

For Android 6.0 and earlier, use CTS v1. For CTS v1, the sample code is at
cts/tests/tests/example.

New sample packages

When adding new tests, there may not be an existing directory to place your
test. In those cases, you'll need to create the directory and copy the
appropriate sample files.

CTS v1

If you are using CTS v1, refer to the example under
cts/tests/tests/example and create a new directory. Also,
make sure to add your new package's module name from its Android.mk
to CTS_COVERAGE_TEST_CASE_LIST in
cts/CtsTestCaseList.mk. This Makefile is used by
build/core/tasks/cts.mk to combine all the tests together to create
the final CTS package.

CTS v2

Use the sample test
/cts/tests/sample/
to quick start your new test module with following steps:

Run this command to create the test directory and copy sample files to it:

Android.mk file

Finally, the Android.mk file in the root of the project will
need to be modified to build the native code and depend on it, as shown
below:

# All tests should include android.test.runner.
LOCAL_JAVA_LIBRARIES := android.test.runner
# Includes the jni code as a shared library
LOCAL_JNI_SHARED_LIBRARIES := libCtsSample_jni
# Include for InstrumentationCtsTestRunner
LOCAL_STATIC_JAVA_LIBRARIES := ctstestrunner...
LOCAL_SDK_VERSION := currentinclude $(BUILD_CTS_PACKAGE)
#Tells make to look in subdirectories for more make files to include
include $(call all-makefiles-under,$(LOCAL_PATH))

Fix or remove tests

Besides adding new tests there are other ways to contribute to CTS: Fix or
remove tests annotated with "BrokenTest" or "KnownFailure."

Submitting your changes

Follow the Submitting Patches workflow
to contribute changes to CTS. A reviewer
will be assigned to your change, and your change should be reviewed shortly!

Release schedule and branch information

CTS releases follow this schedule.

Note: This schedule is tentative and may be
updated from time to time as CTS for the given Android version matures.

Version

Branch

Frequency

8.0

oreo-cts-dev

Monthly

7.1

nougat-mr1-cts-dev

Monthly

7.0

nougat-cts-dev

Monthly

6.0

marshmallow-cts-dev

Monthly

5.1

lollipop-mr1-cts-dev

Monthly

5.0

lollipop-cts-dev

No releases planned

4.4

kitkat-cts-dev

No releases planned

4.3

jb-mr2-cts-dev

No releases planned

4.2

jb-mr1.1-cts-dev

No releases planned

Important Dates during month of the release

End of 1st Week: Code Freeze. At this point,
submissions on the current branch will no longer be accepted and will not be
included in the next version of CTS. Once we have chosen a candidate for
release, the branch will again be open and accepting new submissions.

Second or third week: CTS is published in the Android
Open Source Project (AOSP).

If a changelist (CL) fails to merge correctly, the author of the CL will get
an email with instructions on how to resolve the conflict. In most of the
cases, the author of the CL can use the instructions to skip the auto-merge of
the conflicting CL.